They told people to watch Game of Thrones. They came to some interesting conclusions
Game of Thrones teaches us many things. And it shows the strength of people who are underestimated on a daily basis, and that hidden actions are sometimes worth more than a duel fought by armed battalions. Now, in turn, the famous series has helped to understand our brain.
The popular series based on the prose by George RR Martin, is now experiencing a bit of a second youth thanks to The Dragon’s Blood, another HBO production from this universe. Meanwhile, the team psychologists decided to use Game of Thrones for a rather interesting experiment. It was intended to help us understand how the brain enables us to recognize faces.
What did the experiment involve?
As Science Daily points out, The problem of facial recognition impairment affects about 1 in 50 people. Game of Thrones screenings were designed to help understand the processes behind this problem. For this purpose, the brains of over 70 people who were watching the popular series at the time were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging. When the main characters appeared on the screen, brain analysis showed that at the same time, neurotypical participants who were familiar with the characters brain activity increased in areas related to non-visual knowledge of characters. This includes information about who they are and what we know about them.
To check whether these areas of our heads are important for recognizing faces, researchers decided to conduct tests on similar people with prosopagnosia, a disease associated with impaired facial recognition. Half of them had watched Game of Thrones before, and the other half were watching it for the first time. In this case, however, the familiarity effect was not found in the same brain regions as in neurotypical participants.
Why not Bold and Success?
The study results therefore suggest that our ability to recognize faces also depends on what we know about people, not just what they look like. The disease itself also seems to be linked to limited neural connections. This is supposed to make it harder for us to associate faces with knowledge about a person, which is necessary for recognizing a person. But why was Game of Thrones chosen to study these things?
This was due to the well-developed main characters of the series, who had distinct personality traits. As indicated by the authors of the study, quoted by the Science Daily portal, Many previous studies of this type were conducted in laboratory conditions using static, two-dimensional faces. Meanwhile According to scientists, watching Game of Thrones was closer to real life, where we meet many people at once. At the same time, the team announces further experiments that will allow for a more detailed examination of the causes of facial recognition impairment.
